I began my undergraduate studies as a fine arts major. I studied drawing, print-making, and design. I also took English courses. Eventually I realized that although I loved art, my efforts in literary study achieved better results. I became an English major and doodled on the side. When I went to graduate school, I enrolled in a course called "The Sister Arts: Poetry and Painting." It was about the long tradition of "ut pictura poesis"--as a picture, so also a poem--extending back to classical times. This tradition saw the visual and verbal arts as similar, but different: sisters, in effect. As an English student, I was most interested in Victorian literature, and it gradually dawned on me that many of the works I studied in school were read in illustrated editions by their nineteenth-century readers. This struck me as intersting: those readers had two texts to interpret, a visual text and a verbal text. The two texts might align or enhance, but they could also contradict and argue with each other. Eventually, I came up with a doctoral dissertation topic and went on to publish my first book about this: The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books. In this course, we'll examine a range of Victorian illustrated texts from 1843 through to the end of the century (fin de siècle) in order to see how bitextuality contributes to the meanings of these works, both in historic print culture and our digital present.